This presentation illustrates the pyrrhic effects accompanying increased attempts at protecting the interests of animals under environmental laws. The South African Constitutional Court in National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals v Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development & Another advanced an "integrative approach" that not only directly connects animal protection with the Constitutional right to have the environment protected, but makes the confusing and misleading claim of illustrating the extent to which showing respect and concern for individual animals reinforces broader environmental protection efforts. At issue are two contrasting approaches to the interpretation of two key environmental law concepts, namely "conservation" and "sustainable use". It has been argued that these terms can be reinterpreted through a lens of respect for the individuals that make up a species and ecosystem and that this lens somehow deproblematises the broad collective environmental goals of the dominant aggregative approach to environmental law. This presentation illustrates that the integrative approach is philosophically unsound in claiming to embrace the Animal in her individuality. Rather, environmental law frameworks disavow our embeddedness in nature by creating an anthropocentric biopolitical locus of control that entrenches an oppositional limit between Man and nature and commodifying nature in its entirety. When connected to foundational environmental concerns of "conservation" and "sustainable use", the particularity of the Animal is erased as she becomes objectified and subsumed in a utilitarian calculus as a utility object under the control of humans. The metabolization of animality in relation to these constructs or markers gives rise to what I term the singular-plural aporia in environmental law; a fundamental contradiction effecting a violative relation to Otherness that precludes the possibility of an ethical encounter with the animal Other in her singularity.